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Your television has an off switch and chances are if you don't use it, your children will grow up to be overweight or obese, according to Simon Fraser University communications professor Stephen Kline.

If you do find the off switch, local studies have shown that children head outside to play road hockey or ride their bikes, he said.

In his new book Globesity, Food Marketing and Family Lifestyles, Kline argues that the "moral panic" about child obesity is not only overblown, but it actually distracts us from the real causes of obesity.

Government hand-wringing, hysterical media commentary and heated debates about the role of fast food advertising directed at children are symptoms of this panic about "globesity," the term Kline gives the global obesity epidemic identified by the World Health Organization in 1997.

Parents and activists have since the 1970s pointed to junk food marketing directed at children as a potential cause of child obesity.

Kline is skeptical.

"All the academic literature shows that fast food advertising has a very minor impact on kids' actual food consumption," he said. "There has to be some other explanation."

Teaching children to use media critically is far more important than applying stricter regulations to advertisers, he said. Simply turning the TV off makes children and adults more active.

"It's wrong to focus on child obesity, especially the six-andunders, because they don't have that much choice about what they eat," said Kline. "Young kids are protected from obesity."

Only about 10 per cent of children under six are overweight compared with 60 per cent of adults.

"But in the late tweens and into the teens, they become more like us [adults]," he said. Given the freedom to choose what they eat and how much television to watch, young adults model the behaviour of their parents and start gaining weight."

"The moral panic over globesity was good because it helped make us aware of globesity and identified fast food as the new tobacco," Kline said. "That serves us well, because it makes us aware of the lifestyle choices we are making about food and exercise."

In this way, obese children are the "canaries in the coal mine" reminding us that our sedentary lifestyle comes with significant risks, Kine argues.

"We can get into a fight with McDonald's about their advertising or we can look at our parenting," he said. "Advertising doesn't light your cigarette, as adults we light our own cigarettes and as parents if we let our children watch too much TV and eat poorly -and if we do those things ourselves -we are lighting their cigarettes. Parents can make a difference. Cutting back on TV viewing is one of the most effective ways they can improve their kids' lives."

Children and teens also need to be coached to make good lifestyle decisions and taught to parse the messages of advertising and the media.

"Risk communication has always been about nuclear accidents like in Japan or environmental damage from industry," he said. "That began to change with tobacco."

The epidemiology of tobaccorelated illnesses started a decades-long battle over the right of people to assume risk by their consumer decisions and crystallized the idea that children are a special class of consumers with a limited understanding of the consequences of their actions. Ultimately, the tobacco industry accepted curbs on advertising to youth, and governments became actively involved with anti-tobacco messaging.

What we learned from the tobacco experience is that teens, in particular, need to be actively coached to make good decisions as they transition to a life as independent consumers, Kline said.

"We all have to learn to manage very complex lifestyle risktaking," he said. Part of that process of "consumer socialization" is parents modelling the right behaviour for their offspring.

"The moral panic over child obesity helped us realize something was wrong with our lifestyles, but it masked the fact that we are the problem, not the kids" Kline said.

"Our instinct was to ban fast food ads aimed at kids when the real problem is adult obesity."

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